New Chipset from SiS, SFF PCs and Other Treats

Good morning everyone! I hope you are all digging the new layout, I know I am. Dave, Marco and Jay broke their respective behinds to get this completed and launched on Monday and the effort shows in my opinion. My presence has been sparse lately with personal things taking up most of my time. Fortunately, next week should be the last of it for me, then I should be back in the saddle, along with Rob who recently returned from his honeymoon. So stick around, we have some more goodies coming your way soon!

"Right off the bat we notice a few things that make this case different. There is a large mesh fan grill on the side panel with markings around the outside. This is a very well integrated fan controller Enermax has designed for the rubber-supported fan right behind it. The dial is cleverly disguised as the outer ring of the fan grill. Markings on the side panel show low, medium and high speed with graphics."

"As for actual quality, the card impressed me in some ways. It has very nice image quality through the TV tuner, easily that little bit better than the AiW 9000Pro which was already a very high quality tuner. FM radio quality was good but was hard to get a lock on a clean sound and keep it from breaking up."

"The sticks themselves are pretty good looking. PMI offers the TurboMemory with heatspreaders in two flavors, copper and platinum copper. The sticks I received have the platinum copper heatspreaders. The finish on the heatspreaders is immaculate and the PMI logo is tastefully done; these sticks would look good in any case."

"If the number of offerings on the market is any indication, the demand for inexpensive pre-modded cases must be huge. Almost every case manufacturer has one or more (and in some cases, many) versions of such a case, and more are appearing every day. We've looked at a number of these cases recently, including the Raidmax Scorpio and Cobra, NZXT Guardian, and the Xoxide DemonX. The Super Flower X-Mask SF462 mid tower case falls into this category as well, but as we'll soon see, behind the X-Mask's flashy exterior lie a number of features you might not expect to see on a case that costs less than $70, including a 350 watt power supply. What we'll see is that it just goes to show you that inexpensive does not necessarily equate to cheap."

"NVIDIA AND VIA have dominated the enthusiast market for Athlon 64 chipsets, but they're not the only ones with core logic for AMD's latest processors. SiS has quietly been churning out the SiS755 chipset, which is seeing a lot of action in inexpensive Socket 754 boards from ECS, ASRock, and Foxconn. Can the chipset's features and performance keep up with its Athlon 64 competition? We tested a SiS755 board against VIA's K8T800 and NVIDIA's nForce3 150 and 250Gb chipsets to find out."

"Wireless is thought of by most users as a feature that they don't need. After all its just a mouse and keyboard right? Three years ago most mice had a ball and then optical mice were released to much the same opinions as people have toward wireless now. This wireless combo may be the one that changes your mind."

"We have details about upcoming Serverworks chipsets coming in up to 8P configs for Opteron. This ties in with what was alluded to in AMD?s Q1 earnings report. Also reportedly Sun and Serverworks are cooperating on 16 and 32 CPU Opteron chipsets."

"What a case. Honestly. She's a big old heavy bugger, but she's beautiful. There is a ton of space in it for devices and HDDs, and the side-facing HDD rack is very innovative (not to mention convenient). The tool-less design makes for easy setup and reconfiguration, and the included PSU and 120mm are fantastic additions. I'll say it again; it is very hard to pull off a pre-modded case such as this without making it look campy and cheesy. CasEdge has done an excellent job. Now, if they can work on the few minor flaws, they'll have a stellar case on their hands."